Garrett Bradley’s film America opens with a headshot of actor Bert Williams, followed by production stills of the actor in blackface. The images transition to a scene from the 1913 film Lime Kiln Club Field Day, one of the earliest surviving feature films with an all-Black cast. In the excerpt, Williams moves past the camera, riding a carousel and laughing alongside a female companion. Bradley seizes this moment in cinema history as an inception point for imagining a new archive of films—most from the early 1900s were lost—and considers the ways these pictures might represent the achievements of Black Americans. Luminous black-and-white vignettes—of parents collecting their children from Scouts, ripples of light reflecting on water during a baptism—signal a new history for cinema and the country at large. ST